In 1981, Anthony Arceneaux signed up for an aquaculture class at Southwestern Louisiana University (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) believing he would learn something about crawfish. His faith was shaken during an early class, when the professor announced to the students that mudbugs only mate in April.

"I raise my hand and say, 'No, that's not right, ' " Arceneaux recalled. The professor "started laughing at me. I said, 'I have crawfish right now that are breeding.' "

The professor made a deal with his student: The class would take a field trip to Arceneaux's crawfish pond. If they discovered breeding crawfish, Arceneaux wouldn't have to pay for the class.

"The second crawfish trap he picked up, he was amazed, " Arceneaux recalled, grinning mischievously. "I told him, 'This is coon-ass crawfish. They make love all year.' "

It was neither the first nor the last time that Arceneaux found himself ahead of the crawfish curve.

The farmer-cum-restaurateur/mudbug innovator was raising his own crawfish before he'd mastered the ABCs. He sold them for 15 cents a pound to his second-grade teacher. As a sophomore in high school, he got a Farmers Home Administration loan and "started raising crawfish big time."

David Grunfeld / Times-Picayune

"At that time, my father was raising a bunch of crawfish too, " Arceneaux said. "That's when things really started taking off in the crawfish business."

Arceneaux was sitting at a table inside Hawk's, a restaurant you could easily drive past while mistaking it for a tractor garage or chicken coop -- which would be a shame, because in actuality it's among the best boiling pots on the planet.

Arceneaux's father, L.H., better known as "Hawk, " opened the restaurant in 1983. The building, set in a patch of woods surrounded by rice farms and crawfish ponds, was built in the late 1960s as a kind of mess hall for itinerant workers.

"The oil industry was really big around here at that time, and we had all sorts of oil field workers coming from all over the country with no place to eat, " Arceneaux explained. "My grandfather would have suppers here. In this part of the country, all the local people would take turns and bring supper."

The Arceneauxs were, like many families in the patch of Cajun country northwest of Lafayette, rice farmers who as the 1970s turned into the '80s had increasingly turned their attention to raising crawfish. When the price for rice plateaued, farmers discovered they could seed their rice fields with crawfish in the summer and have another product to sell by fall.

"People started to realize you could make a couple extra dollars if you came in with some crawfish after the rice, " Arceneaux said. Soon "all this crawfish was on the market, and no one knew what to do with it."

L.H. decided to open Hawk's "so we had a place to get rid of this stuff, " according to his son. "There weren't really that many crawfish restaurants, even down here."

"Most of the farmers I knew back then raised crawfish to sell as bait, " said Robert Bieber, a Cajun crawfish farmer who sells to Arceneaux. While locals have been boiling crawfish at home for as long as he can remember, Bieber added that Hawk's was the first area restaurant he could recall that sold boiled crawfish.

Despite being located, as its menus and T-shirts accurately advertise, "in the middle of nowhere, " Hawk's has grown exponentially in its quarter-century of existence. In fact, the rise of crawfish's mainstream popularity can be traced on the restaurant's floor tiles, which change in style and color along the contours of every new addition. Thanks to expansions in 1984, '86 and '89, what began as a 1,000-square-foot shack in the woods is, well, a much bigger one.

STAFF PHOTO BY DAVID GRUNFELDA crawfish feast at Hawk's

The growth can be explained by the crawfish themselves, to which the Arceneauxs pay the sort of attention Alice Waters-worshipping, culinary school-trained chefs lavish on seasonal produce.

As a child, Arceneaux remembers his father being obsessive about "cleaning" crawfish, a process that involved his running them through several changes of clean water to rid them of the "mud" in their digestive tract.

"I remember getting off the bus, and they'd have the water boiling to boil crawfish. At my house, that'd be three times a week, " Arceneaux said. "And my daddy would sit there and clean that crawfish. We were hungry, and he'd sit there and wash them and wash them and rewash them."

Before opening Hawk's, the father and son traveled to Texas A&M University to learn a purging technique that would allow them to clean crawfish on a mass scale. The result of years of tinkering can be found inside a metal shed a short gravel-road drive from the restaurant. The three large tanks inside are linked by an elaborate plumbing system that aerates the fresh well water running through the system 24 hours a day during the crawfish season -- the only time of year the restaurant is open.

Arceneaux pulled a basket from the water and plucked a crawfish out of it. He explained that it was halfway through a 24-plus hour purge that would clean the creature entirely from the inside out.

"My dad said, 'If we're going to serve crawfish, they've got to be clean, ' " Arceneaux shouted above the high-pitched squeal of the purging equipment. L.H. also wanted Hawk's crawfish to be as large as possible, which means not all of the crawfish that enter the purging shed end up in Hawk's boiling pots.

Arceneaux took over Hawk's from his father in 2005. More recently he sold off his crawfish farming equipment to concentrate full-time on the restaurant. Even when he was still farming, he could never raise enough large crawfish to satisfy the demand at Hawk's.

Today, he purchases from a network of 70 to 80 farmers. The sacks are picked over by Louis Thevis, who separates the premium crawfish from the scrawny ones, which are rebagged to use as feed or resell on the market. Arceneaux figures about seven of every 10 sacks he purchases end up going to the restaurant.

"I'm always the most expensive restaurant around because I have more money tied up in the product, " Arceneaux said. "It adds up, but my product is a better product."

Every batch of crawfish at Hawk's is boiled and seasoned to order. A request for extra salt is recommended. It brings into focus the flavor of the spices as well as the crawfish meat, which is noticeably sweet, firm and completely pearly-white save for the bit of yellow fat that clings to the tail's end after you dislodge it from the head.

They're served in plastic beer trays in a low-ceiling dining room decorated with Miller Lite lamp shades, but Hawk's crawfish are still the closest thing to lobster to come out of Louisiana's swamps.

Arceneaux's 76-year-old mother, Denise, still makes the crawfish etouffee, a rich concoction of unblemished tail meat. Even the boiled potatoes, which are slow-simmered for three hours, are worthy objects of obsession.

"When you bite into it, it's going to be smooth, smooth, smooth on the inside, " Arceneaux said of his spuds as he stood among the 25-gallon pots in Hawk's rear boiling room. "The skin is going to be intact. It's not going to be flaking. We do it right."
_____________________
HAWK'S415 Hawk's Road, Rayne, (337) 788-3266

Hawk's is a 2 1/2 hour drive from New Orleans. It is marked by signs but still hard to find. A map can be printed at www.hawkscrawfish.com. The restaurant is closed today in observance of Good Friday.